Vernacular

I wanted to tell you I was feeling better today, but I don't think I can.  Maybe tomorrow. . . or the next day. . . or maybe not.  

I went to bed last night thinking about the pictures I would like to make with this Fuji GFX camera.  I wanted to think of something pleasant.  The camera is transformative.  What I mean is that it does something to those every day things in life that strike your eye but don't come off so well otherwise.  I think I've found a camera/lens combo that fits my vision.  It requires a different way of working since it is bigger, heavier, than film or full frame cameras.  But it is not too big to carry or shoot without a tripod.  I may give up on my pursuit of. . . whatever I was hoping for. . . and just shoot the things that catch my eye around me.  The images I am making with this camera now seem incredibly "gentle."  They are quiet and low key and perhaps mean nothing, but what does?  A cafe table is as profound as anything else, I think.  Our lives go by so much unnoticed or noticed only in memory.  More photographs are taken every day now than were taken in the whole of the 20th century, I think.  I may be wrong.  I may have made that up, but it seems true.  And people have gotten very, very good at it, too, better, in some ways, than the vernacular photographs of old.  But only in some ways.  They have lost much of the naiveté that made those older photographs more precious.  Today's vernacular look so much like advertising photography by which the eye has been shaped that they are at once both wonderful and average.  

Maybe I'll give up on people in pictures.  Those are everywhere.  For now, at least, a cafe table is good enough for me.  It is subtle.  It brings me a little peace.